TWO REVIEWS AND A SPECTRAL INTERLUDE Heredities, Flood Song, and Incantations APR Books
Would we trust other ghosts?
—Dawn Lundy Martin
I.
I was so excited to hear that J. Michael Martinez and Sherwin Bitsui had poetry collections coming out in 2018. Martinez’s Museum of the Americas was selected as a winner in the 2017 National Poetry Series and arrived via Penguin Press in October, and Bitsui’s Dissolve was published by Copper Canyon Press, also in October. The books are the third collection for each poet, and both Martinez and Bitsui continue to push at the limitations of language(s), particularly challenging English to express cultural histories, concepts, and values that may not be accessible through the King’s English, trained as it has been by Anglo-European experiences and visions of the world. My excitement for these collections is warranted. Martinez and Bitsui again summon the kind of linguistic energy that writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha identify as potentially available when confronting colonial languages (Thompson, xix; Lafage, 227; Cha). Martinez and Bitsui are engaged in making English more inclusive. They are engaged in more than that, of course. However, as you can see by the title of this essay, I am not making a review of their new collections.
Looking forward to the new works, I returned to Martinez’s and Bitsui’s earlier collections. I was reminded of how impacting the collections have been for me. Martinez’s Heredities (2010) and Bitsui’s Flood Song (2009) particularly helped me to sequence thoughts that were flickering. The works provided engagements through which that sequence could hold and, in what follows, I am tracing those thoughts. I’m always trying to find language for a world of meaning that is proximate to the consensual reality erected by the King’s English. And I’m always thinking about how that King’s English can be used against itself (especially as I do translation work). But the goal is not only to create more flexibility in the English language for structures of feeling and thought that English has not yet, or only awkwardly, rendered. My goal is to approach a world of meaning that exists beyond embodied or embody-able experiences.
In a sense, I’m asking: how far past “human” can language go and still transmit meaning, or, how can meaning be captured semantically from non-anthropomorphic realms?
In order for the body’s anthropomorphic identity, a self, to emerge, the body must provide a field of comprehension. A self is identifiable for whatever interval of time the body provides sensory context; meaning is created, accrues, and is sustained, and the self resides in that field of comprehension. This process, I suppose, is co-creative. The self serves as the interpretive element, as the organizing principle; so, meaning’s arrival depends on the self thematizing that sensory input. But if the body’s collection of sensory input is already wooed by the urge toward an anthropomorphic identity, then, really, interpretation is already restricted. Could the body create another, a radically different, field of comprehension, one where meaning is not cast in such exclusively human terms?
The embodying experience typically integrates the self into some consensual reality, a reality that is largely shaped and held in place by language. (That integration, of course, is not inevitable.) For me, Martinez’s Heredities and Bitsui’s Flood Song have functioned as immersion studies into this always-perplexing issue of how the self thematizes and is thematized. How does language come across the body? And where does the body surprise language?
In , Martinez interrogates the cultural and linguistic selves that make up the book’s speakerly presence. Might the intersection of those selves provide some terminus, some hint of origin, against postmodernism’s contrary insistence?1 Knowing how “origin,” like the word “authentic,” is intellectually unfashionable, problematic for being vague and for reducing historical contingencies to uncomplicated chronological nodes, let me clarify: here origin is not the anchor of an if-then chain. Origin should not be conflated with causality. I maintain the distinction by borrowing from Hannah Arendt, who suspects that “[c]ausality, i.e., the factor of determination of a process of events in which always one event causes and can be explained by another, is probably an altogether alien falsifying category in the realm, Martinez locates cultural and linguistic distinctions within the context of a Latino identity and poetics. He attends to a heritage that has been under assault across languages and geopolitical borders.
